Robert W. Service Quotes

The world is full of scribbling Nobodies
who think they’re scribbling Somebodies.

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A helf-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow, and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you've a hunch what the music meant . . . hunger and night and the stars.

There's the wretched rent to pay,
Yet I glower at pen and ink:
Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,
It is later than you think!

It's coming soon and soon, mother, it's nearer every day,
When only men who work and sweat will have a word to say;
When all who earn their honest bread in every land and soil
Will claim the Brotherhood of Man, the Comradeship of Toil;
When we, the Workers, all demand: `What are we fighting for?' . . .
Then, then we'll end that stupid crime, that devil's madness -- War.

Oh it is good to ride and run,
To roam the reenwood wild and free;
To hunt, to idle in the sun,
To leap into the laughing sea

But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true,
That one of you is a hound of hell . . . and that one is Dan McGrew.

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a rag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.

I count each day a little life, With birth and death complete;
I cloister it from care and strife And keep it sane and sweet.

Some praise the Lord for Light,
The living spark;
I thank God for the Night
The healing dark.

Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway;
From my ruthless throne I have ruled alone for a million years and a day

Marriage is a bachelor’s punishment for his sins

Nature is the nest professor in the end.

This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive;
That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive.
Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,
This is the Will of the Yukon, -- Lo, how she makes it plain!

After fifty don’t go to a funeral if you can avoid it. It’s bad enough to go to your own when times comes.